Literacy workshop on the Congo estuary

(This “news” is three months old, but still needs to be shared. - Miriam)

The training had been talked about and always put off. Now, near the end of October, we were on the overnight bus rattling along toward Boma, the first port city to the Atlantic in Bas-Congo Province. In the Saturday evening dusk, porters had trussed all the baggage up on top of the bus and passengers piled in, wedged between narrow seats. Four of us were going: Chantal, Mama Yango, Rose and myself. Chantal and Rose are traveling companions from ‘way back. Sunday morning , in the still coolness of morning, the bus pulled into the parking area, downtown Boma. It was one of the most comfortable trips we’ve made, despite having to travel all night.

Literacy is particularly important to town-dwellers. In rural areas people get by without reading. But when they move into town they find themselves at a disadvantage. They’re handicapped. So much information is written. Deprived of information, people have fewer opportunities to make a better life.

Boma has statues everywhere. Some of Congo’s best sculptors live here. We collected our bags, passed the square’s statue and took a taxi bus through town to where our hostess waited. She shepherded us up her steep hill, past one church being built out of rough lumber near the bottom, turning a corner up a steep narrow pathway past another church on a terrace cut into the hill about half-way, another turn, then up steeply past some houses on more terraces, then finally up past the trees to look out over the Congo River estuary and Boma’s ocean shipping port just before the rise to their gate. The hill continued up just a little more to another church, the mother Christian and Missionary Alliance church for Boma. I later discovered that the national headquarters of the C&MA church which had evangelized this area was on this hill: past missionaries’ houses (I’m sure our host’s was one), offices, a school, their printing house and library, their legal rep’s house and a guesthouse, where we had stayed one night on a trip to the coast when our kids were little.

Besides their international shipping port, statues and the C&MA, special features of Boma are history, hills and rock. Boma is a special town: one of the first ones settled by Europeans. The encyclopedia says that Boma was founded in the 16th century as a slaving station when the respectful relationship of the Portuguese and the Kongo kingdoms deteriorated into a slaving one. When King Leopold II of Belgium was running Congo as his personal colony in the end of the 19th century, Boma was the base of operations. It continued as the capital city of the Belgian Congo to 1926, when the capitol was moved to Leopoldville (now Kinshasa.) Their #1 tourist site is the baobab tree in which Henry Morton Stanley slept (old ones often develop large hollow interiors) when he was in town. On a hill facing us is one of their oldest buildings, a small chapel, built for King Leopold’s men.

The Baptist headquarters in Boma, where we had our training, is on the peak of another formidable hill across town. Strong winds routinely batter their church and school. Surprisingly, this church functions in Lingala, to reach the many Boma residents who come from elsewhere in Congo.

Negotiations for this training had gone on for months. Local leaders had neglected the necessary groundwork. The women’s president, a thoroughly urban woman, had not considered the onset of the rainy season and the planting schedule of women dependent on farming. No churches of other denominations in town had been invited. Even the CBCO churches in the outlying district had been ignored. Many of the women were out of town planting peanuts, and few came to be trained. No one was available to become a French teacher for adults. In a preliminary meeting, the mayor of Boma almost wept at the wasted opportunity for her town. Last minute phone invitations were made.

We had 8 trainees from the church plus 3 others. Most of them were well educated and understood things quickly. All were capable. Most chose to teach in Lingala. A couple of women chose to teach Kikongo for locals. Three lay leaders of one of the village churches arrived for the Kikongo training, excited at the opportunity. The pastor joined, haunted by the memory of all the illiterate people in his village, and their dead-end lives.

The workshop participants were divided into two groups: one for each language, one at each end of the sanctuary. Our “blackboards” were raw plywood sheets propped on benches, there for a church construction project. The dynamic woman leader only had a junior-high education, but is a pusher. She’d done more with her education than many high school graduates. She’s the kind of woman who transforms her village.

The villagers were fun! Their dialect of Kikongo, KiYombe, drawls and sings. Each word in the lesson became extraordinary. There isn’t a KiYombe dialect Bible. But since the curriculum includes daily Bible lessons, we had come with two modern Kikongo version Bibles (thanks to you), recently off the press. Even the pastor hadn’t seen them yet. We gave one to the pastor, one to the village leaders. Such a treasure! They trembled with joy.

The second part of each day’s session was learning to make beaded mobile phone pouches. They are all the rage in Kinshasa and sell for $10: a good cottage industry, where you can get the beads to work with. The Boma women really loved this part, and some ladies came just for these sessions. Our trainees were learning to make the pouches in order to teach their future students.

Why? International literacy circles say that simply getting through a reader or two does not make most adult learners functionally literate. The real goal is to navigate easily in the literate world. People should be able to find their way around a Bible, read and understand charts and diagrams, work with written instructions, understand and fill in voting ballots and other forms, etc. Part of the vision of my colleagues, and the Boma women participating, is to lift themselves and their reading students out of poverty. So we now include in our teacher training events some written instructions to give to their classes to practice reading and trying out: sewing instructions, handicraft instruction like that of these pouches, cooking recipes, or recipes for other saleable products. I suppose that if our classes were all male, we would give building instruction or include some pages from a mechanic’s manual to work with.

A week later, Chantal, Mama Yango, Rose and I were on another night bus, rattling our way back toward Kinshasa. We left behind 11 intelligent and motivated people equipped with the tools to teach adults to read. Sometimes it’s not the number of people we train, but their quality and sense of purpose. The Lord brought us together for a purpose. Now we wait for news that they’ve started classes, with the beginning of this new year.